


halfway gone,

by atelier



Category: Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
Genre: Gen, Suicide (and suicidal thoughts), happy ending what what what!!!, realizations of mortality, you didn't quite make it in time this time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-01
Updated: 2012-07-01
Packaged: 2017-11-08 22:46:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/448399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atelier/pseuds/atelier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"They'll prove him innocent," he adds, but she's already halfway gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	halfway gone,

She'd like to tell herself that she's known from the very beginning that this would be how it ends. She'd like to tell herself that Sissel, you should have seen this coming, you saw this coming, but all she's seeing is a corpse that isn't moving, a heart that isn't beating, and --

( _Yomiel, take off your sunglasses for me? I'd like to see your eyes_ )

\-- she can't see his eyes. Maybe he's alive beneath it all, maybe if she reaches out one hand to pick up the dark pair of shades, but she stops herself fingertips away from his face. Because come on, Yomiel, you can't hold your breath forever. Any thoughts that he was just asleep must have sprouted wings and flown away, leaving her with cold fingers and a heartbeat that's loud enough for the two of them. 

The sunglasses stay, and instead she smooths the folds of his lapel, fingers trembling over where there should be a heartbeat; she knows his heart and where to feel for it (and all those times she laid her head against his chest and just felt), but it is cold and she draws herself up, arms crossed over herself protectively. She thinks she hears someone's voice.

"Can I go now?" Perhaps she's interrupted, but her mind is a blur and her ears are abuzz, as if there's something static playing through her head, as if she's wearing a faulty pair of headphones or perhaps she's six feet underwater.

"Yes," says the doctor, and she thinks she registers something; pity, concern, worry, detachment? "We only needed you to identify the body."

"It's him," she says, her voice slow, lips moving and tongue pressing against her teeth, feeling out the 's' sound. Sssss. Ssss.

( _Sissel, he says. Funny name, he adds. Yours isn't much better, she replies. They both laugh, and she thinks maybe she can forgive the man in red for tonight._ )

It's a long taxi ride back to her apartment. She hears the voice of the attorney sitting next to her, the police detective, saying meaningless things to her. Meaningless. It's all over. There's nothing more for her to do.

"We'll prove him innocent," he says, but she is already halfway gone, hands pale and folded in her lap and eyes staring blankly out the window, a question half-formed on her lips. The attorney, or detective, or murderer, or whatever he is, doesn't notice.

She's never been particularly poetic or elegant, nor would anyone ever call her a refined lady by any means, but she thinks it feels kind of like someone's punched her in the guts and taken half of her insides with them. Something hollow, beneath where her heart and lungs should be. The thought of eating doesn't occur to her, it hadn't occurred to her ever since he was brought in for questioning and they had told her, ' _We have reason to believe that your fiance is a spy. This is a matter of national security, ma'am. We're detaining him for questioning right now,_ ' and she remembers thinking to herself that Yomiel could never be a spy, even as she had sat, with her hands twisted in her hair, hiding her face from the world (but there was nobody with her to say, shhh, Sissel, it's all right), on the soft carpet of their apartment. Her apartment. Because Yomiel wasn't coming home today, either.

( _How's work, she had asked. It had been meant to be a casual question, but she sees how his muscles tense up around the corners of his mouth and his shoulders hunch up. He tries to ease it into a shrug but he doesn't fool her, he never has. It's fine, he had answered. He tries to twist his mouth up into a smile but all she can think of that is that the work is twisting him up and wringing the life out of him._ )

She doesn't remember turning the lights off. But when she wakes up at midnight with her head folded in her arms and her body slumped over the kitchen table, (when had she fallen asleep?) she is surrounded by darkness. She fumbles with sleepy hands for something, anything, her fingers finally closing around something hard and metallic.

A phone, a cell phone at that, lying wrapped in her fingers. Same model as Yomiel's.

Yomiel.

( _See you tonight, she says. Yeah, he nods. Tonight._ )

Tonight?

( _Miss Sissel?_ )

Sissel.

( _We need you to identify a body._ )

Sissel?

( _Blonde hair, pulled up in that crazy hairstyle, red suit, white tie black shirt black glasses pale skin no breath no heart_

A phone doesn't mean anything, she thinks to herself, with the phone weighing down on her palm like lead and her fingers tapping on the keys just as heavy, if there's nobody on the other end.

** send: text message; from yomiel. to sissel:

**Yomiel, I'm coming.**


End file.
